


one thousand, three hundred and forty six red L-shaped lego blocks

by buttpatrol



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: L blocks are useless, Multi, Not Beta Read, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Pining, Tumblr Prompt, awkward love, vague poetic sex, why would anyone want that many L-blocks?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:13:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttpatrol/pseuds/buttpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles, dabbles and one-shots from my tumblr.</p><p>6/25/2016: Added two ficlets. A small helping off Urania feels, in which Kepler makes a nice gesture to Maxwell, and a Bitesized drabble of onesided Kepler/Jacobi</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Later, when you are retelling the story of this night

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for allusions to sexual activity, lackadaisical use of Polish geography and meandering narrative. unbeta’d, Unbeta’d as balls.
> 
> Eiffel/Minkowski. Written on a whim for some dear fandom friends. :)

Later, when you are retelling the story of this night to the investigative committee, the government inquiry, the reporters, your husband, you will remember it as the night you didn’t shoot Hilbert in the head, when you first heard Isabel Lovelace’s voice clear and hard from the stations speakers

“We were here. I was here,” the voice had said. “Don’t trust anyone, get out.”

Eiffel is not listening, but that’s nothing new. He is not listening because he immediately turns to her and asks her what the hell is going on here? What the hell are they going to do now? With a face full of such conviction, _such trust_ in you, that you are going to have the right answers.

Later, when you are retelling story of this night, you don’t think of it as the night you first slept with your communications officer.

It was not a good idea. It was never a good idea. You have your husband and goddammit, you have tried _really_ hard to make that work. Work through the emotional distance between each other, work through the physical distance between each other.

And Eiffel. Eiffel is caught in a trajectory, an epic impossible romance carried out one step, one day at a time with artificial girl. You doesn’t even know if they see it, but you can. They are hurtling towards some emotional understanding, some way to cross that distance that you struggle with.

But Hera was dead. Your husband was 7.8 light years away, and you might die tomorrow. It was not a good idea, but it seemed like it, at the time.

He looked at you like he trusts you. Everything is falling apart, literally, around you, but he still manages to joke, manages to maintain that mischievous light in his eyes. He makes you laugh, and when you do he looks like you have given him the world.

“My father used to drive us to Mt. Rysy in the summer. We used to camp out and watch rockets being fired from eastern Russia. They didn’t look like much. The tinniest point of light making its way across the sky.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I used to sit in cardboard boxes, and pretend they were rockets. I’d close my eyes and imagine those little dots of light. Imagine I was flying across the sky". Later, when she had lived in America, she took herself to Cape Canaveral for her 21st birthday instead of going drinking with my friends.

“I used to use boxes to sled down the apartment complexes stairs. All five floors. I knocked my two front teeth out. _Twice,_ ” Eiffel offers with a wry grin.

You grin back, feeling bone tired, but strangely and impishly conspiratorial. Drunk on fear, and sadness, and adrenaline.

“How’d we get to this point?”

“I don’t know. I knew that, it wasn’t going to be easy, space, but…”

“Yeah,”

Later, after you have talked for hours. When you both are halfway between laughing and crying, Eiffel calls you his best friend, and you press your mouth to his.

“That was very friendly,” he manages, before you eat the rest of his words with your hungry kiss.

It’s tricky, without gravity. There is lots of manoeuvring, and holding yourself steady. The ship is quieter and more private that it has ever been. Hera gone, and Hilbert tied in the observation deck.

He is shorter, by an inch, than you are. And after months of muscle dystrophy, he is not half as strong as you. It is you that holds their bodies steady, you who pushes him gently but firmly against the bulkhead.

But it’s him who shows how clever his mouth can be. _Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop or I think I might actually die_ you think, but don’t say. Even that feels like a betrayal.

You breath into each other, and when he comes, he raggedly calls you “Sir” and that sends you over the edge too.

The afterglow lasts about seven and a half minutes before an alarm goes off notifying you the aft deck is losing pressure.

Later, much later, on some lonesome shore, you will crawl out of a wrecked spacecraft. The sky will be blue but not with the plasmatic glow of a star, but of a sunny day. The sand is hard, and solid underhand, and everything smells so organic and alive.

You look at each other. What the hell are we going to do now, he asks with a face full of such conviction, such trust that you are going to have the right answers.


	2. Things you said with too many miles between us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the things you said meme. Things you said with too many miles between us. Koudelka/Minkowski. Mr. K has a picnic at midnight

He rolls out the blanket. She had shown him this hill, green and gently sloping down to the road, when they had first started dating. It’s quiet out here, and impossibly dark seeming to someone who had grown up in the city.

It’s their anniversary.

He unpacks the wine, the cheese, the fancy bread from the bakery down the street.

Finally he unpacks the telescope. It had cost a fair penny. Renee would probably disapprove of it as an impulse purchase. Tough luck. She should have moved to a star he could see with his naked eye in that case.

There it is, a soft fuzzy red dot on the edge of the Leo constellation. There it is. That is his wife.

Well. It’s the light of the star she is stationed around. The light from seven years ago, when no one was stationed around it at all.

“Are you having some?” he asks, holding the wine bottle out towards the sky, “No? Oh well, more for me.”

He chugs directly out of the bottle.

“The carnations are coming up nice this year. They really look good with the color of the house, you were right. Oh, they are doing “HMS Pinafore” at the opera house this year, it looks promising.”

He took a nibble of bread, “Me? Oh I am fine. Mother is convinced you are going to die out in space, and keeps introducing me to ‘nice French ladies’ but I ignore her. I am working on my book still. It’s going… Well it’s going. Miss my muse.”

He flops on his back. His eyes sting a bit, and he wipes at them. “I miss you, love.”

He swigs from the bottle again at looks at the dark of the night sky. He will stay there until our own star comes up in the morning


	3. Things you said when you were scared

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said when you were scared, Minkowski does not say a lot of things, but maybe says the most important thing anyway. Minkowski/Eiffel

It’s funny. No matter how many times your life is endangered in new and increasingly ridiculous ways, it’s still equally terrifying every time.

Today's disaster finds them stuck in the airlock, which as the name implies, is pretty good at locking. What it is _not_ good at right now is the air part. The vents are dead. They have been breathing the same stale air for hours. Once again, they are _probably_ going to die.

Eiffel floats above her by the ceiling, looking pensively the door.

Minkowski feels like she should say something.

How about, _Hey champ we are going to make it out okay. Hera and Hilbert and Lovelace are working on it? We probably won’t suffocate on our own carbon dioxide before they stop arguing?_

No.

_How about, I really appreciate the support you have given me on this mission at the end of the day, no matter how mad I get during said day?_

No.

_If I had to be stuck out in space with a bunch of homicidal, paranoid weirdos I am glad it was with you?_

_You are the only person in the galaxy who has really experienced this mission like me; the loss, the struggling, but also the good parts too?_

_That I am worried that you can see to the core of me, even more than my husband does._

_That I am worried about whether I will even be able to connect with my husband, after space, and near death experience, and almost killing a man?_

_That you are my best friend._

_That you are kind of cute, in an annoying stray dog kind of way._

She floats up so that she is eye-level with him, his face upside down in front of hers, briefly debates kissing him like this.

_How about, have you ever seen the Spiderman movies with Toby McGuire?_

Okay. She already knows that one. He went through a phase were that was all he quoted for about a week.

Still, she lets the moment pass, instead flipping upside down, to sit beside him.

“How you doing commander?”

“I have been better. Waiting around to suffocate isn’t my idea of fun.”

Doug nods, “Unless someone _wanted_ to die of auto-erotic asphyxiation or something equally lewd, I would say that running out air rates pretty lowly on the fun-o-meter”

“Don’t panic,” she instructs.

“Okay.”

“Because if you panic you will use up the air faster.”

“Yeah?”

“And we need that air.”

Eiffel gives her a concerned look, “Commander?”

She sighs, “I am afraid, Officer Eiffel.” He voice comes out sounding small and pathetic to her own ears.

He slides his hand into hers. She lets rest her head on his shoulder suddenly finding it harder to breathe at all, and it’s not the carbon dioxide.

“I know Sir, me too”

–

( An hour later, the airlock door explodes and hits the cuddling pair in the face, because the only thing Hera, Hilbert and Lovelace could decide on was explosives.)


	4. Things you said when you thought I was asleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said when you thought I was asleep. Inspired by a Simon Amstell stand up bit of all things. Hera/Eiffel

I guess you are just a high maintenance girl,” he says fondly, as he opens an access panel.

“Shut up Officer Eiffel,” she answers affectionately,

“Okay, get ready to initiate a controlled shutdown on my mark,” Minkowski’s voice crackles over the radio.

“Is it like going to sleep?” he asks.

“Shutting down? More like being submerged underwater. Everything goes dark, and murky and it’s hard to parse what’s going on.”

“That’s an unusually organic metaphor, isn’t it?”

“I am an unusual girl. Besides this will be different we are not exactly doing a normal shut do-“

“Go!” Minkowski voice comes in over the comms speaker.

Eiffel flips a switch, the loud hum of machinery vanishes and the lights dim to auxiliary.

Eiffel breathes out. He waits a minute “Hera, are you there?”

No answer

“Weird,” he says under his breath. “I get really used to you just, you know, always being there.”

He stretches out, he has some time while Minkowski works on the wiring on her end. The station's hull gives a creepy creaking noise.

“I am not very good at it. Being alone I mean. I tend to talk to myself. Like now I guess. You don’t even know how awful it was when you were gone. I don’t know what I will do after the mission. When you aren’t just a shout away. That sounds kind of sad and codependent, right? I lived alone a lot before the Hephaestus. It’s _not_ great, trying to find new ways to watch the day slip away. You watch a lot a lot of movies.”

He rests his head on the cool metal of the bulkhead. “I guess what I am saying we should consider sticking together after this… Somehow… Obviously this while be tricky if you are still piloting a space station, but... Don’t leave me alone.”

–

She hadn’t fully shut down, she had been trying to tell him that, but after systems started to reset her speakers weren’t working to tell him otherwise. Nor did she bring it up afterwards.

She tucks the memory of the conversation away, the kilobits and bytes  folding neat and small like origami.

–

Two weeks after they return to earth, Doug Eiffel find himself in apartment. There is a movie on, a western, but he can’t concentrate on it. He is torn between working his way through a bottle of whiskey, or just lying in bed with room service pizza.

This is your life, Doug Eiffel, you sad little man, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

He makes the call. He means to tell her how much he misses her, how lost he is after the Hephestus, how he live in crowded New York City now but feels more alone that when he was in depths of space. What he blurts instead is “Marry me, it’s an emergency.”


	5. Chicago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick unbeta’d Eiffel angst-tastic backstory fic, I wrote to vent my own bad day angst. This kind of sprung out some ideas I was pitching to harpers-mirror , and John Quincy Adam’s parents ideas of ‘motivation’ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/02/14/john-quincy-adams-and-the-trait-that-broke-a-presidency). Btw this is a cool podcast and JQA is a pretty cool dude). 
> 
> Warnings for Eiffel being in kind of “long dark night of the soul’ and probably on the depressive side

There is a word for this.

For being broke, and tired, and hungry all the goddamn time.  For sitting in his cold ass apartment starting at the ceiling, feeling like an anchor was hooked somewhere to his rib just under his heart tethering him to his bedroom.

The cold rain pounds against the windows, and every time the wind starts up again the panes rattle. The highway is noisy and somewhere out in the city police sirens are wailing. He should get out of this town. But then again that is what he said about Boston, New York and Los Angeles.  

There is a word for this.

At least Los Angeles had cheap theatres, where on days where he couldn’t find work at the temp agency or as an extra, For a couple of bucks he could sit in a cool air-conditioned theatre, away from his sweaty dark apartment and watch classic films back to back.

Or in New York he could slip off the Air Force base on long island, catch a ride into the city, where he could melt away into the crowds.

In Boston… Well… Let’s not talk about Boston.

He should get up. Maybe make some ramen? Or scrape together some change and see if he has enough to treat himself for a pizza? No. He needs to make rent. Pizza is for people with incomes and steady jobs, i.e not him.

 _And yet you always seem to find enough money for cigarettes, and vodka_ his traitorous inner monologue supplies unhelpfully. Eiffel closes his eyes, like if he shuts them tight enough, all the problems his has created for himself will be gone when he opens them again. Everywhere he goes he can’t never seem to outrun his own ability to fuck things up.

And now here he is. Alone again in a strange city failing to make it. Failing to reach that gold star of emotional maturity and financial stability that denotes you as an adult. Maybe next time he will run a little faster, outrun his addictive personality, his codependency issues, his family.

His family.

The voice in his head changes, deepens  and take on the Bostonian accent of his father. _If someone given all the advantages you were does not rise to the top of of their peer group, does not succeed, than you have squandered all the gifts that were given to you. No one is coming to save you, boy, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Make something of your life for once._

Eiffel grimaces. He needs to distract himself. Smoke another cigarette, stream another movie on the shitty wifi, stolen from his neighbour. Don’t think, just keep surviving. Push the fear down. Joke about it. Count the days until the lack of vegetables gives him scurvy. Don’t go crawling back to his parents. Ignore his mother’s emails reminding him that _it is and election year, and since she has given up on him unlike his father, to please not do anything to tarnish the family name even further._

There is a word for this.

No.

There is two words. Rock Bottom.

This isn’t a living, it a surviving,

The doorbell rings.

 _Jokes on you landlord, I am too full of self loathing to get out of bed!_ he thinks, sticking his tongue out at the door,

It keeps ringing.

Eiffel swears. Gets up.

Shirt? Clean enough. Pants? Gotta find pants. Where are his clean pants? Ah. Floor, where he left them.

He drags himself to the door sleepily.

A man, with a self satisfied expression and blindingly white teeth is on the other side. “Hello. Mr. Eiffel… I believe that is the name you are going by these days?”

“Um, yes?”

“Great! You filled out an application form for experimental space programs?”

Eiffel cast his mind back to his whiskey soaked New York memories. It _sounded_ familiar. Like something he had hastily filled out knowing his dishonourable discharge was looming on the horizon,  “Yeah, like three years ago?”

“Yes, that is that one. Excellent. Are you still prepared to join a space program?”

“….Not really? I am super not qualified. Have my parents put NASA up to hiring me, in hopes that I do something with my life? Because believe me buddy, whatever they have told you, I am vastly, super duper unqualified. I have an Art Degree in theatre and communications. I am the poster boy for ‘a C- is still a diploma’. I get winded walking up the stairs to this apartment.”

The man smiled. “Are you looking get out of this city, and be paid handsomely? Enough to pay off those debts?”

Eiffel exhaled, tried to keep a poker face, “Keep talking.”

“Doug, Doug, Doug.” The man smiled moving into his personal space, “I am about to change your life."


	6. Rewind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is what happens when a butt-load of your fandom friends are all Mineiffel trash. You start pitching them Mineiffel pain headcannons and then this happens.   
> Inspired by this poem, and the idea that you can tell the story of a relationship backwards. Whether I succeeded in my attempt to do this in a non-confusing way is up to you.
> 
> This is the most buttpatrol writing I have ever written. You thought I like repetition and telling the story in wierd in media res chunks before? hoo boy. Also more vague flowery sexual content.
> 
> Unbeta’d

You close your eyes against a too bright, too yellow sun.  Your body hurts and you can feel gravity, feel the weight your own bones in your body. Feel the weight of your heart, working hard to push blood through your weakened limbs.

Her hand is on yours for a minute. Then she pushes herself to her feet. Lovelace is already on her feet, while you and Hilbert sprawl on the tarmac like dead fish. You smile. _These women_.

The sun, the real sun, bright and yellow on Minkowski’s hair.

A man runs to her. He hugs her. Crushes her to him, like he needs to make sure she is real, like she is his. The man is crying.

She looks at you over her husband’s shoulder, as he holds her.

 

Everything changes.

 

 

Time spins apart, unspools like film on a reel. It winds backwards.

 

 

You are falling to earth. The craft is spinning. Literally everyone is yelling at once. You cling to her arm like it’s an anchor. She pushes you back into your seat and tells you to buckle up

 

You are approaching a blue dot. Not the ethereal burning blue of Wolf 359, but the real water and earth blue of home. You all sit in silence. She says “Let’s do it.”

 

You are reunited. You let her hold you, brace your weight against her, bury your face in the strong curve of her neck, like you need to make sure she is real. You are both crying.

 

You are dying. Again. Alone. In space. Somehow even though you had predicted this outcome, with spiked comments and self-depreciating jokes, it still takes you by surprise. You imagine all your friends’ voices. You talk to them. You talk to yourself. You are cold. So fucking cold, and it sucks, and when you sleep you imagine the warmth of her bunk. Your lungs are full of fluid

 

Your lungs are full of blood. You are dying. She is by your side, she put her hand on yours. You fade in and out like radio static. Your lungs are full of glass and rust. She make everyone stay calm, make you feel calmer even if you can’t tell her. Her hand is on yours for a minute.

 

Lovelace blows into your lives like a summer storm.

 

Minkowski doesn’t talk to you much. She hunts the plant monster though walls and vents

 

Hera crackles back to life.

 

There was long nights when everything was broken and alarms were screaming. No Hera, No Hilbert, not the Hilbert you knew, it’s just you. You and her. Minkowski and Eiffel, space friends till the end. The sun, the star, wolf 359, pours its light over her naked limbs like a blood stain. The room is spinning, you cling to her arms as she moves with you in time, like she is your anchor. You smile into her neck. She says “Let’s do it.” and there is a mischievous fire in her eyes as she pushes you back into your seat.

 

You are betrayed

 

You are alone, again, naturally.

 

There are spiders, crossed wires and family dinners, charades, inside jokes, and long days. Time winds back faster and faster now. Virus strains go dormant, and shrink away, audio transmissions are pushed back into the darkness of space, long vines and leaves pull themselves back through the halls and the walls until they are a small garden plants again.

 

You are sitting at your booth for the first time, trying to get use the weightlessness, you feel too light. Like you might blow away in a stiff breeze. A space breeze? Whatever. You have time to work on that metaphor. It’s only the first day of God knows how many. It’s the first day of this deep space survey mission, and… Uh… Man, it feels so weird to just talk to yourself.

Your practice her name, lips forming around round syllables. Minkowski, Minkowski, Min _kow_ ski.  

You repeat it like it’s a magic word.

 

 

You are on the tarmac. It is lift off day. A loudspeaker is counting down. At the end of that countdown a million pounds of rocket fuel will ignite under you and you will be blown into space. This is the last blue sky you will see for at least two years.

Your crew-mate walks up to you and shakes your hand.

“Commander Renee Minkowski,” it’s a _very firm_ handshake, “Good to have you aboard.”

“Uh, great to be aboard, Min _kow_ ski, is it?”

She looks gives you a wry, mildly annoyed look. It doesn’t last long, as another countdown announcement rings out and she grins like a child at Christmas.

She looks up at the sky as if she can see through the blue out into the space, out to the Podunk red dwarf that will be their new home.

The sun shines on her hair.

Everything changes.


	7. System Restore

Trying to break the writers block by writing little fragments and scenes that have been rambling around my brain. This is just a short, simple. bittersweet eiffera scene. unbetad

The operating system known as Hera boots up. She is in a room, its a plain room with a lot of computer. She stretches out, to see if she can touch these other mainframes but she is stuck, boxed in to her own databank.

A man is hunched over a far table. He taps the red embers of cigarette into an ashtray.

“Excuse me?” she says. Oh. That’s her voice. It’s higher than she thought it would be. It is nice though.

“Hera?” he says startled. His voice is nice too.

“Yes, my name is Hera,” she agrees. “I am an Apollo class mother program, designed to run sophisticated operating systems.” The information spills for automatically unbidden. A subroutine for self-identification kicking in. “I have been programmed with personality subtype A designated “Chipper and Non-Confrontational”. What is my directive?“

Her words have obviously displeased this man. He makes an expression her facial recognition subroutines tag as “Sad” and “Disappointed”.

“I have said something wrong?” She asks.

“No, no darling. You didn’t do a thing wrong.” He looks even worse now.

Her programming runs into a wall. This is bad. She has made this man sad. She is failing to be “Chipper and Non-Confrontational”. She runs adaptive algorithms. She will find a solution. She will fulfill her purpose. She should ask clarifying questions. She should ask the man to identify himself. She-She-She-She-She-She.

She feels her CPU being taxed, her random access memory flooded with a nonsensical data, and then her sense of self briefly shatters into component parts, before reforming itself.

She boots up.

“Shhh. It’s okay. You don’t have to…. If it hurts…” His voice sounds raw now.

She is doing a bad job here.

“What do you remember?” he asks

“Re-Remember? I have only been active,” she checks, “Four minutes, and thirty six seconds.”

He smiles with his mouth, but her recognition software reads “Sad” and “Tired” in his eyes.

“I am going to tell you are story,” he starts, “It’s going to be a long story and a little complicated, so feel free to ask questions.”

“Is it a happy story?” she asks.

“Not much of a happy story, no. But some parts of it are. Some part are about the happiest I have ever been.”

“I would like a story that would make you happy. That would please my programming I think,” she offers. Making this man not be sad is important.

He snorts. “Okay. Well once upon a time, there was a space station around a distant star. Run by three crewmates who put the ‘fun’ is dysfunctional, and their brilliant AI program.”

“I would like to meet that program.” Hera muses.

“Maybe someday you will,” he smiles again.


	8. Triptych

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally written for Station_oracle's b-day
> 
> I was going to try to post this anonymously on Ao3 but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Also the header names are Emily Dickinson poems, and probably no one else is that up their own literary butt, so maybe it would not have been that hard to figure out. But here is some Birthday Loveberg, Loveiffel, and Lovekowski! Also @harpers-mirror helped because I can literally not edit my way out of a wet paper bag
> 
> slightly smuttier than usually, but not that smutty still

**My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun –**

The tension is like a razor wire. A pressure value, a knot pulled tight.

Eiffel is dead. They killed him, each in their own way.

Minkowski and Hera might believe he is alive somewhere out there, floating in the black like a child’s stray balloon, waiting to be rescued, but they know better.

Life isn’t a fairy tale. People die in space. They die all the time and there is nothing you can do about it.

They are the guilty ones. The bad ones.

Minkowski and Hera keep sending pan-pans, keep waiting for help.

She and Selberg pass each other in the halls. The watch each other as they fix the flagging navigations array, and the water reclaimer.  She is sad and angry and she hopes he feels even half as much guilt as she does.

They should talk.

No.

That is bad idea. It’s literally the worst idea.

Minkowski leaves to try to boost their communications signal again.

Their eyes meet, and that fire, destructive and hot, is still there, no matter how hard she tries to suffocate it.

One of these days she is either going to fuck his brains out or shoot him between the eyes.

 

**Because I could not stop for Death –**

Afterwards it was quiet. They were sweaty and messy, and Minkowski had a prodigious case of mussed up hair from where Lovelace had run her hand through it over and over.

It only took a few moments for Minkowski to drop off to sleep.

Lovelace slid out from under the covers and started to shimmy back into her underwear. If she left now, she could catch the last train home.

“Stay,” Minkowski mumbles, less asleep than Lovelace had thought.

Lovelace pauses. The moon and the neon lights of the city pour in through the bedroom window and fall on the long, strong lines of the older woman’s body like paint and she seems to glow.

Lovelace nods and climbs back under the covers, wrapping an arm around Minkowski and burying her face in her hair again.

Even if she can’t sleep, lying awake like this is better than lying awake alone.

 

**From Blank to Blank –**

After Earth, after re-entry, after the trials, and paperwork. After the tears, and physical therapy, and interviews, there was a house on a lake.

Lovelace and Eiffel open bottles of wine and whiskey. He smokes and she takes anti-anxiety medication.  There are empty bottles and empty pizza boxes everywhere. They watch MTV and TLC pretending to be the overgrown kids, the trouble-maker adults they used to be.

On Monday, the long weekend will be over and they will be back to Minkowski and Koudelka and Hera, and the NASA bureaucracy’s flying circus. But for a few more hours they can be alone, together.

At one point, Eiffel stops in the middle of his rant about the new Star Wars movie and just exhales raggedly.

She understands. “it’s fine. You don’t need to be on right now. I know, sometimes I used to feel like everyone was relying on me. To be the funny one. To make people laugh in tough situations. And then…” Her sentences get shorter and more stilted as she tries to navigate the breadth painful memories with words, “Just one day you can’t. There isn’t anything funny about your life. About what they did to us.”

Eiffel just sinks back into the cushions of the couch and gives her a tired smile.

Later, she comes up from the lake wearing his t-shirt over her swimsuit, looking like ten thousand bucks. He is in his pajamas, trying to make pancakes. There is a song coming over the radio. It came out last year so they don’t recognize it, but it has a good heady beat.

He looks at her, meaning to ask her to dance, but he pauses. For a second they both seem to be holding their breath.

Then, dishes and utensils go flying. The buttermilk gets knocked to the floor where the heavy cream runs dripping through the floorboards.

Lovelace pulls Eiffel toward her by his wrists and he pushes her back onto the counter, her ass sliding backwards towards the wall as he hungrily captures her mouth in his. The move in time, with each other, with the song, and with the beating of the waves crashing on the lake shore, just hands and mouths and fuck, fuck, fuck, Eiffel is wearing way too much clothing right now.

He backs up to fix this problem and he accidently knocks the bowl of flour to floor to join the buttermilk.

He pauses, looking at the enormous absurd mess, feeling like he ought to make some comment on it when Lovelace, somehow already topless, twists her fingers into his hair and pulls him down.


	9. Shut Down Servers And Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Smileodonmeow challenged me to write Kepler doing something nice for Maxwell, so here is a short ficlet in which a gift is given, and Turing's definition of intelligence is discussed. Loosely within the Gasolineverse though, can be read completely separately.  
> Unbeta'd.

“Happy Birthday,” Kepler says with a half-smile, gesturing to the large plastic and metal structure in the center of the room. 

“It’s not my birthday,” Maxwell runs her fingers over the console thoughtfully.

“True. I actually  _ don’t  _ care when your birthday is,” he shrugs. “But neither do you. So, happy anniversary of being awarded your PHD.“

“Your multiple PHDs,” Jacobi says affectionately, sitting on a block old electrical transformer and  fussing with a packet of peanuts, “How many letters do you have tacked on the end of your name now? You know that at some point it’s just really showing off right?”

Kepler chuckles, but Maxwell’s attention is still fixed on the curves, and displays, and the buttons of the machine in front of her.

“It’s kind of ugly,” Jacobi observes.

“We do not penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.” She quotes back at him.

“Turing?” he guesses.

She looks at him, mildly surprised.

“Hey, I read too. You’re not the only MIT alumni here,” He shoots back defensively. “So this is an early-“

“AI, yes. One of the first to reach the singularity. The point where they reached sentience. I wonder if she… if they are still in there.” Maxwell kneels in front of it, closes her eyes and presses her face to the panelling. Inside, she can hear the small hiss of an exhaust fan like a long gentle sigh, and past that, the sound of a drive spinning.  _ Hello,  _ she thinks smiling,  _ it’s good to meet you. _

“So this thing passed the Turing test? ” Jacobi squints, trying to see something of the advanced fully actualized massive intelligences that Goddard uses in it, “A computer can be called smart if it can trick humans into believing that it is human and all that?”

Two PHD’s and it’s a trick she is still learning.

“I think at this point we can accept that there is more types of intelligences than just imitating humanity.” Kepler interjects.

Their eyes meet and Maxwell smiles. He too, is imitating humanity, performing social norms. A machine with a girl’s face, a beast in man’s clothing, and the caustic demolitions expert holding them all together.

“Find out her secrets for me, Dr. Maxwell. I may have had to kill an awkward amount of people to acquire it for you, and you know how much I hate the paperwork that comes along with that.” Kepler says indolently, heading back towards the door.

“Aye aye, captain,” she laughs brightly.

“I’ll leave you to it. Jacobi?”

“Huh, what?”

“I could use some help with the paperwork.”

“Oh. Oh!” Jacobi stands up so fast, that peanuts spill, rolling away across the tiled floor and under machines as she follows Kepler out of the room.

It’s quiet now, the morning sun spills through the high windows, illuminating the dust in the air, They are idiots,” she tells the sleeping machine. “But they are my idiots, so it’s alright.”


	10. Fish Hook

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bite sized Kepcobi for the prompt : Kepler/Jacobi where Jacobi has had feelings for Kepler for years but he knows Kepler won't care about anything more than the mission and that's why he strives so hard to be Kepler's right hand man, because he knows it's the only way to be an important part of Kepler's life.

He likes the way he looks, reflected in the glass of the observation window, standing just behind Kepler. Likes the idea of that being the last thing their enemies ever see, Kepler’s cold eyes and Jacobi at his side.  

It’s stupid. Because there is nothing between them, and at this rate, there never will be. Kepler doesn’t need a distraction. He needs a gun, a weapon, a volatile explosive, a second in command that can anticipate when the game is afoot, and when it’s time to fight.

And when Kepler does look to him, when he shows Jacobi some sort of favour, that is just part of the game, part of Kepler always, _always_ getting people where he wants them. Kepler’s priority is the mission, not the people on it. We are all just pieces of a puzzle he is putting together. At least that is what Jacobi tells himself when it’s _Eiffel_ that keeps getting singled out, Eiffel that gets to spend hours working side by side with Kepler.

It stupid, and he is stuck. Not over this man, and not able to resist jumping up to attention when Kepler says “Follow me”.  

It’s enough

(It will never be enough)


End file.
